Tabulae Rasae
by Laryna6
Summary: The plan was to put X in a nice capsule where he'd be safe while he developed his own programming and decided what kind of person he wanted to be. Then Blues kidnapped Dr. Wily's final project before he could finish programming it. Rock doesn't regret giving Zero a home, but now they need a reinforced playpen. And a whole lot of enrichment toys.
1. Chapter 1

_This is a giftfic written as thanks for wing-maiden letting me use her art as cover illustrations for Deathless, Become Like Gods & this fic__. They requested the kittydroid 'verse I've been mentioning to various people for quite awhile because cute._

_Currently I'd have a hard time doing X or Zero POV, since they're quite a ways pre-language. I RPed a bunch of random scenes in this 'verse with the wonderful Nemi and I would try to find the logs, except I have this tendency to balance happy fluff with Nightmare Fuel and the overall 'verse is… Well, there's less genocide than canon, and the characters _we _care about certainly suffer less? Due to what's implied about robot rights, I had to work to keep the end of this fic from swerving into depressing._

_I may or may not do something from a later developmental stage at some point, but that point would hopefully be several months from now since the last thing I need at the moment is another epic._

* * *

It was a little dangerous to open the door, but not that dangerous. X was dead to the world while he slept. He could have evolved the ability to wake up if something happened nearby, but he hadn't yet, and he probably had a disincentive to evolve that capability at the moment. If X _could _wake up just because Zero poked him wanting to play, then if _Zero _figured that out? Not that Zero's configuring systems didn't need just as much sleep, but especially at the beginning their awake time wasn't synced up.

Rock wondered which of them had evolved to figure out how long the other was going to be sleeping while they configured based on some new data and wake up around that time. Likely Zero, if he wasn't the one with the capability to wake up when people poked him. He had started out with a little more aptitude for developing movement programming than X, Rock and Dr. Light were pretty sure.

Probably because he was meant to be a warbot, or a war android? It was a good thing Blues kidnapped him before Dr. Wily installed that programming.

Rock frowned at himself, watching them sleep sprawled over and around each other. No matter how cute they were, he needed to be watching them for signs they might wake up. What if Zero could detect people's presences now, or soon, and wake up then? That would be a challenge in the future, definitely, but for now Rock needed to get in there and swap out the enrichment toys.

It wasn't like it would permanently damage them to not have new enrichment toys, the way human brains could be permanently damaged if they didn't get enough sensory and interaction input during various development stages, but X and Zero were both the firsts of their kinds, so Rock couldn't really be sure they weren't like humans in that way!

He would rather try to sneak in without his armor since he'd be quieter that way, but if Zero did wake up? Zero had a tendency to pounce. Or try to pounce: without movement programming he tended to fall over his feet and end up tangled in his hair a lot. At least it would take him a few seconds to get untangled from X, Rock thought, glancing over as he picked up the chewed rope toy and put it in the bag.

It wasn't safe to hook Zero up to a capsule, since they _really _didn't want him to evolve his intended capacity to control other systems (including other _people's _systems), but he still needed mental stimulation to develop. Locking him in a room by himself would cause him to develop in the absence of other people, instead of evolving to interact with other people and hopefully make friends with them. If everything he dealt with was a toy, would he be able to realize that other people weren't toys? Especially since he was Dr. Wily's attempt to build someone who wouldn't mind killing people.

X was designed to be as close to impossible as possible to reprogram or control, and he had the infinite potential system too, so playing with him would force Zero to evolve to actually talk to people and make friends instead of controlling them, hopefully. Humans should also be hard to control, but they didn't know that for certain and Zero was easily strong enough to kill a human. The fact he didn't really control his own strength yet made him even more dangerous to be around.

X had fallen asleep on top of one of the puzzle toys, as well as Zero's hair and legs, but that was fine: they hadn't figured out how to get the wooden ball out yet. Well, not on purpose, anyway. Zero had got it out while rolling around with the toy, but since the toy wasn't broken Rock had just slipped the ball back in the last time he came in to change around the toys.

It would be nice if they could give X and Zero plush toys to hold, but they were a little too breakable. Especially since some of the toys had treats inside, especially the puzzle toys, to encourage problem-solving and give X and Zero more stimuli for their systems to use to adapt and develop. Also, they were learning motor control, and figuring out sensory data, so it wasn't just Zero that would get them held down by an arm (or X's leg) and tear them apart with his teeth.

That was why they were giving them rope and plastic to gnaw on.

They were very, very lucky that X's systems hadn't known what to do when Zero tried to take him apart or gnaw on him. Very lucky. It meant that he went to sleep while his systems tried to configure and figure out what to do, and after that happened a few times Zero figured out that when he applied too much force to the moving thing, the moving thing stopped moving and making noises and doing all the interesting things that were good for helping supply Zero's systems with data.

Or keeping him from being bored. It was really the same thing. Humans, especially children with developing brains, reacted so badly to not having enough data input because it wasn't healthy for them.

Then X had figured out that if he stopped moving when Zero did something he didn't like, and kept not moving or making noises and not looking at Zero, then Zero was less likely to do it again. Then _Zero _learned that if X stopped moving then sometimes, (but only sometimes, because their developing systems needed a _lot _of hibernation time) if Zero stopped doing whatever he was doing when X stopped, the really interesting thing might start being interesting again.

They were such cute, smart baby learning systems!

Rock was really worried for X until he had enough observations to be pretty sure that playing dead was really a strategy for making Zero stop attacking X. They hadn't been sure what they were going to do if Zero didn't learn that hurting people was wrong on his own. Even if it wasn't horribly wrong to inflict pain on people to try to influence their decisions Zero was predisposed to like combat, so Rock couldn't fight Zero whenever Zero attacked X. That would teach Zero that attacking X meant really good combat data. Fun, even, if you were a warbot like Forte that liked fighting. Rock really, really didn't want Zero attacking his baby brother in order to get to Rock.

Now they had to be more worried about X learning to attack Zero than the other way around, since Zero liked being pawed and chewed on. What if X grew up thinking that biting people's hands was how you made friends?

Especially since Zero was a learning system too, and _Dr. Wily's_ learning system, so he might be even better at developing strategies for getting X to pounce and (hopefully just play-) fight him than X was at getting Zero not to tear pieces off Rock's baby brother.

It was so hard to make sure that people developed the right problem-solving strategies when you couldn't just upload to them! At least you could talk to adult humans. How did humans manage, when their entire species did so much really important brain configuration work and chose settings before they could even use words to upload data to them?

The capsule was meant to make sure that X had plenty of mental stimulation to work with and could even get test data on what happened when he did all kinds of things without anyone actually getting hurt. They'd all worked really hard on its programming so Rock wished they could use it, but it wouldn't be right to leave Zero without a chance to develop properly. It wouldn't be safe, either.

When Rock got the last toy he crept carefully back to the door and only then got the bag of new toys. He started to carefully toss them into the room (the floor was covered in padded red and blue squares with trees and other designs on them, thanks to Roll) and left the plastic ball with holes large enough X and Zero could stick figures through them to touch the bell inside for last, since that toy would make noise. That was part of the point of the toy, to help teach that actions and reactions were connected and reactions could include sounds, like a bell jangling when Zero pushed the ball across the room.

Even Zero didn't wake up at that, so either Rock was right and they weren't processing sonic input while asleep yet, or they were both still too busy processing the data they got from playing the last time they woke up to interrupt it right now even for the sake of more data, and new data from brand new toys at that.

A little over eight hours later, Zero was the one to wake up first. Rock had expected that since X had fallen asleep suddenly that morning, just curled up with his hand still stuck in the puzzle. When one of them suddenly stopped interacting with the exterior world, that meant their systems had something they wanted to work on or integrate _now_, so it was generally something big. Since Zero took the time to curl up around X first before he went to sleep, that meant he'd just reached the point where he had enough new data for it to be worth hibernating again. If there was anything all that exciting in that data, he wouldn't have taken the time to set things up so wiggling around to get loose again when he woke up would yield more movement data.

They did understand that toys vanished sometimes: even when X didn't fall asleep in the middle of something, if he was still working on a toy he fell asleep touching it. After a few dozen rounds of enrichment toy exchanges, X had enough data to try and see if he was right that the ones he and Zero were touching didn't get swapped out.

Maybe Zero had figured that out even earlier! Sure, the first few dozen times he and X fell asleep together were because interacting with a system that responded to the specific type of interaction yielded a lot more data than toys with a limited range of responses to what the two of them did, but Zero did still play with and examine the other things introduced into his environment.

Rock would need to see if Zero slept tangled up with X _and _one of the toys the next time they found a toy Zero really liked, in order to get some evidence for the theory that Zero slept around X because he wanted X to stay. He'd still have to tell Dr. Light, since that would be a really good sign if it was true.

X didn't respond when Zero was untangling himself, so clearly the interesting thing wasn't on yet. It was kind of fun to imagine what the two of them might be thinking – Roll was better at it, since she spent more time linked to more primitive units than Rock did. Rush was a support unit, and they'd made sure he was fairly advanced since helping Rock fight other robot masters put him in danger.

Then Zero started to peer around. He had very good vision and other sensory equipment, because Dr. Wily was Dr. Wily, but his systems still needed to learn how to use it and build up a database in order to get good at converting a collection of frequencies and vectors into any kind of decent 3-d model of Zero's surroundings, and being able to look at something and quickly identify what it was definitely required a database. Blues managed to grab Zero before he even had a dictionary.

Zero had already figured out that sometimes, frequencies that were different from their surroundings meant there was something there, although Roll giving the floor decorations probably hadn't helped. Zero still tore into some of the cushions with specific colors sometimes, to see if there was anything in there this time.

Was he good enough at comparing current visual input to past to have any certainty that things weren't where they were the night before? Was his grasp of object permanence still poor enough that he thought things vanishing when he wasn't looking at them was the default instead of a specific phenomenon that needed an explanation?

The idea that the toys wouldn't move unless an outside force acted upon them was a Newtonian Law for a reason, and then Zero would have to come up with reasonable causes (X woke up and moved the toys while he was asleep, which would require grasping that X still did things even when unobserved and unaffected by Zero, or toy replacement happened again) before he could look at the room and guess that different visual input meant new toys.

Maybe they'd be excited then, like humans in the countries where they opened presents on Christmas Morning? That would be cute!

For now, though, Zero was trying to turn X over, since he'd noticed that X rolled away from the wall a bit when Zero pulled his legs out from under X's body and pulled X along with him.

Well, at least he wasn't treating Rock's little brother like a soccer ball? Possibly because X was too heavy.

They'd put them both in armor, removed the buster parts and disabled the armor release systems. Hopefully X and Zero would have a few other things figured out by the time they managed to figure out how to take off their armor, like not punching people's torsos as hard as possible. It might have been more comfortable for them to curl up together without armor, but trying to keep them clothed would be a nightmare, and even though X was still figuring out how to get strength out of his servo motors the way Zero was working on optic data, Zero had _some _set defaults already. Dr. Wily was working on getting his ultimate creation functional _now,_ not in thirty years or so, when X was ready. Strength was one of them, so he had to work on figuring out how much force to apply, not how to apply force at all.

After getting X to roll over and repeating the movement both ways for more data, Zero flopped back down and began trying to roll over himself. Ah, so he'd made the connection that he and X were somewhat similar shapes, sizes and weights, enough that they might be similar in other ways and what applied to one might apply to the other?

And there Zero went, rolling over X! It made Rock laugh, although normally he didn't like people manhandling his family members. He was really looking forward to when X and Zero graduated to playing together, instead of poking at each other (playing with the other person as the game, instead of playing a game with the other person) or playing with different things next to each other.

Eventually Zero rolled far enough to hit the jingly ball, and yes! That was the kind of reaction to a new stimulus they were hoping for, excited and playful instead of worried or aggressive. Zero started zooming around trying to find the jangly thing, and of course stray elbows and knees hit it in random directions, so he couldn't just pick a section of the room and narrow it down to there.

Rock couldn't be sure if X woke up when the jingle ball hit him, or just decided to open his eyes and start moving them instead of watching his internal systems boot up when the source of the sound came within a few inches of him at the same time as he felt something touching him. Maybe he'd been listening to all the new audio input? Just because humans primarily used visual input didn't necessarily mean that X would treat that as his primary sense, especially this early in development.

"Do you think X will like soccer?" Roll asked, taking a break from sweeping for other people's bugs to come sit in the observation room. In theory, cameras were cameras: how was watching X and Zero through their physical bodies' optics from a few meters away that different from watching through a camera? But people being physically present mattered to Dr. Light, and since he mattered to them they made an effort to be near him. So Rock guessed it ended up feeling like a nice thing to do? To be with family in body as well as perception, even if it wasn't safe to get much closer to X and Zero than this.

"I know Zero will like it," Rock said cheerfully. "It doesn't have to be a bad thing to be competitive." And Rock was sure that Zero would be coordinated enough to be really good at soccer… someday.

X's leg twitching and sending the ball into the opposite wall was what inspired Roll's question, and of course Zero went chasing after the sound. X turned his head in the direction they went: whether he was doing that to better track them with audio or visual input, that frown was clearly asking why the interesting things were going _away_ from him. Now he'd have to _move_, and moving was _hard_.

"I'm glad there's just a little default emotional display programming in there," Roll said, because X had the cutest little frown. It wasn't anything that X wouldn't overrule in the process of developing his own, of course: it was just there so they could be sure he wasn't experiencing any distress in the capsule.

Fortunately (maybe) the jingly ball was soon headed back in X's direction. Roughly. Roughly was also how Zero handled him, once he realized that the interesting thing was awake and that meant there were _two _interesting things that made noises to poke!

"I don't think they're making any progress with writing to long-term memory," Roll said, wincing when it became obvious that both of them had forgotten about the jingly ball. Zero's eyes were trying to track X's movements as X tried to get the ball out of the puzzle, which was a matter of trying to get his fingers to do what he wanted as well as spatial intelligence.

"I think X's coordination is a little better than Zero's," Rock said, even though it was a little embarrassing how little that was saying. He'd helped Dr. Light build X, after all, even if they'd never intended for him to come out of the capsule and have to fend for himself before he got over this clumsiness. He still ended up feeling like he really should apologize to X, because if Rock had given X copies of his movement programming, then at least X would have _something _to work with and wouldn't get so frustrated. Still, it was really valuable to learn how to work things out for yourself, right?

"I think that's mostly because Zero doesn't care," Roll told him as Zero kept trying to grab the moving things and missing. Hand-eye coordination was much harder than humans made it look, and walking upright! They used hundreds of different parts, muscles and tendons and all kinds of things, to make it look so easy. "He likes being active and moving around, so if he doesn't manage to grab the toy the first time, oh well." It meant he got to grab for it again! "I think it was a bad idea to let the Wilybots have that footage," she told him. "At least when Dr. Wily wanted to find out what was going on and Shadow was worried that Blues killed Zero instead of handing him over to us, we only had to deal with Shadow. The footage we picked to prove that he was doing alright and was learning… showed that he was learning."

And robot masters were meant to look after little robots. Baby learning systems were _adorable_. Now they had even the _Fifth Numbers _trying to get a look at the adorable things. Which meant a lot of extra work for Roll.

"I wouldn't mind letting the Wilybots see their baby brother," Rock said. It was unfair _not _to let them, when Rock was watching his baby brother. "But a lot of them don't _really _understand…" That if X and Zero's existence leaked, robots without the Three Laws? They couldn't have just sent Zero away, but this was putting X in danger.

Still, at least they could hope that whenever X finally had to face the world, he wouldn't have to do it alone.


	2. Chapter 2

_This is a giftfic as thanks for ValentineSin13 drawing a cover illustration for _Innocent Sin_. They gave me another prompt, but then they asked if there would be more kittydroids. _

_Zero thinks of himself as 'it' and 'this unit.' X uses 'he' and has a concept of 'things that exist.' Out of the things that exist, the question is which is the 'I' and his defining trait so far is that he pokes interesting things. He's noticed that Zero does that too, so he has Zero in the same category as himself, while Zero has yet to create a 'person' category, and instead has the categories of 'the thing doing the observing,' the things that do things when he does things (toys) and things that don't do things when he does things (the wall). He prefers reactive to non-reactive, and his actions causing X to go to sleep sometimes have made him aware that what he does can turn reactive into non-reactive, at least temporarily. This is a boring thing to have happen. _

_I'm not using 'he' because X has any understanding of pronouns or gender, but because he has a pseudo-'people' category and has himself in there, while Zero doesn't. I'm conveying this by having Zero use 'it' while X… isn't actually using a pronoun for people, but would be if they were actually thinking in words. While 'they' is in fact correct usage for third person singular of unknown/irrelevant/non-male-or-female gender, thinking of using it gave me ideas, using it could imply things about X's self-perception that are just as incorrect as the implications of using he and he doesn't make verb conjugations look like they're wrong. _

_They both had some programming going in, and that's causing their observations of the world to cause them to build very different frameworks for sorting and understanding it._

* * *

This new thing was a pokety toy with colors and bumps and different bits of color on the bumps.

It made sound when this unit touched the bumps! Different sounds!

There were… lots! Lots of bumps! It slapped its hand on the bumps and different noise and ooooh.

The toy that moved in all kinds of ways and made sounds was looking at this unit and the new toy that made sounds. Oooh! Maybe the other toy would come over to roll around! It often did that when this unit found a new fun toy.

Instead it kept poking at the toy it had, but that was fine. This toy was _very _interesting to poke and bat at and turn upside down and press down and oh, maybe it could touch bumps that weren't next to each other?

* * *

The other thing-that-poked-things had stopped moving _lots _of times, and it still wasn't letting the toy with lots of noises go.

He had gone over to poke the thing-that-poked-things because it was fun to move and be moved and turned all around and feel bits move and sometimes the thing-that-poked-things forgot about toys after that and moved on to other toys and then he could play with the interesting toy. It didn't work the first time so he went to play with another toy until he stopped moving, and then he'd tried again and the other thing-that-poked-things had stopped moving, but he wasn't able to poke at the toy before he stopped moving himself.

When he was moving again, he only got to poke at the toy twice before the other thing-that-poked-things came to roll around, and it grabbed the toy! When he had to stop moving, the other thing-that-poked-things still had the toy, and when he tried going to over to poke, it wouldn't let him push the toy away from them so he could try to roll over to it first when they stopped poking each other later.

The toy must be _veryvery _interesting to poke, maybe even as interesting to poke as the other thing-that-poked-things if the other thing-that-poked-things wasn't done poking it yet!

He poked other things, because not having anything to poke or move was bad, but he wanted to poke the thing that made all kinds of sounds! What if the other thing-that-poked-things pushed it away from him when he was asleep and it vanished before he even had a chance to poke it?!

* * *

The toy that made all kinds of noises was the _best _toy! As long as it had this toy, the other toy that made all kinds of noises and moved around kept stopping playing with other toys and came over to let this unit poke and roll around with it instead!

If the other toy had the toy, then if this unit went over, it would poke and roll around with this unit instead of how it often just waited for this unit to go away if it wanted to poke other toys.

This toy made the other toy roll around with it! And it made noises! It was the second-best toy!

* * *

Part of the reason for the simulations was to teach X that even though he had much more powerful plasma weaponry than could be safely built into a robot master without the accumulated strain causing his buster to give out on him when he really needed it (Blues ruined busters all the time), it wasn't a very good idea to use violence to solve all his problems and disagreements.

X was missing the simulations because they needed to put him with Zero, but it looked like Zero was doing a _very _good job teaching X that resorting to violence could make things worse instead of better.

Rock's little brother looked about ready to cry from frustration.

Roll had built a much, _much _sturdier version of the kind of human baby toy that made different sounds when the babies pressed different buttons, to help them form associations between whatever was on the buttons and the various sounds. It wouldn't have been worth the effort to put something in there until now, but they were pretty sure that Zero had finally gotten the idea that if he applied too much force to things they stopped making sounds and being interesting.

X was more likely to break things apart on purpose to look at the inside bits, but only after he'd explored all of the outside. It was partially their fault for putting treats in some of the puzzle toys, but when engineers tested to destruction all the time… Well, hopefully giving them enough experiences would help them realized that what you did was different in different situations. Like, if someone was a person, you didn't open them up so you could look at the bits that fell out.

Normally, when Zero was playing with a toy and X wanted to play with the toy, he just waited until Zero was done. Trying to push it away from Zero didn't work because Zero's eyes were attracted to movement and X tugging at a thing meant X might wrestle with him for it.

This toy was making all _kinds _of sounds, though, and it kept drawing X's attention, and it had been a few days already and Zero was still poking at it. Sometimes X wrestling with him for a bit for something made Zero forget about the original thing afterwards, but even when X had taken advantage of Zero being distracted by an especially bouncy ball to roll off with the sound maker, Zero came over and wanted to wrestle for it back as soon as X started pressing buttons.

Not that Rock wanted X to grow up thinking it was okay to take other people's things while their backs were turned, or take advantages of other people's weaknesses relative to him – although both their attention spans were still very erratic.

X wouldn't mind wrestling that much, but normally if he wanted to play with something instead he could just stop until Zero realized X wasn't going to wrestle with him anymore and went away. Then Zero figured out that X would come over and wrestle him if Zero kept the toy, or when Zero went over to take the toy, and that meant X couldn't poke at the toy without Zero interrupting him.

Rock had Roll's blueprints so he could have just built a second one, but this was good for them. He hoped.

* * *

The toy that rolled around with him spent a lot of time not making sounds or moving. It was good that it was easier to get it to move and roll around while it was functional with the help of the toy that made sounds, but that made it stop moving and then this unit had to hope there were other toys to be interesting.

* * *

The other thing-that-poked-things was not moving, and that meant he could poke the toy! Trying to get the toy was very hard to figure out and made him use up all the stuff he could do before he needed to stop moving again very fast. But that meant he started moving again first!

It was bad when the other thing-that-poked-things wasn't moving, wasn't it? But this meant he could get the toy and poke the toy.

* * *

The fun toy stopped being fun before this unit had any time to play with it! There was something like that before, when the fun toy just lay there most of the time but then when it did move it was the most fun!

There was also before when this unit applied too much force to the fun toy and made it stop moving. What was making the fun toy stop moving?

* * *

"Now Zero's getting frustrated that X is falling asleep early and it's making him fall asleep." Rock looked sad.

* * *

…Why was the other thing-that-poked-things no longer poking him? He could finally poke the interesting thing and now the most interesting thing wasn't playing with him anymore!

* * *

"So both of them ended up ignoring the toy to try to figure out why the other one changed their behavior. Do you think they learned anything?" Reviewing the footage, Roll truly wondered.

"I hope so?" was all Rock could say. He'd been really scared there for awhile, when X was moving away from Zero to play with the toy instead of falling asleep on top of Zero to make sure Zero wasn't taken away in the night. Were they not friends anymore? It was a relief to see them sleeping in a pile again now. X initiating play sessions had only reassured Zero after X calmed down enough that they stopped putting him to sleep. "At least they'll remember this the next time something comes up?" Their systems were learning bit by bit, so maybe they'd be a little better able to work things out next time. "I think at this rate, without the simulations…"

"This is going to take a lot more than thirty years," Roll agreed.

* * *

_So many POV shifts... This 'verse came out of an RP series, and that lends itself to switching between character viewpoints. This format not so much. Perhaps if I do another of these they'll be developed enough I can show what's going on with more than one character at a time without switching to Rock to have him tell us what's going on. _


End file.
